Canadian city shaken by timequake

There is perhaps no greater trope used in science fiction than time travel, and there is perhaps no greater reason for traveling in time than if the past and future conflagrate to create an insufferable shitstorm a hero must rectify in the present.

The story’s hero – or more aptly anti-hero, Sam McQuiggan – is a thirty-something bachelor who humorously extols insights about his unfulfilling life while spending an inordinate amount of time in the sauna at the gym where he works detoxifying his mind of the drugs and booze he can’t help but abuse as he pines for Bethany, the one who got away … until a temporal-transcending corporeal incarnation of his former girlfriend appears at the gym’s front desk, presenting along with this fantastic memory phantasm a possibility of redemption for Sam that he longs to engage and sweeping him into a time-traveling conspiracy involving multiverse versions of himself and providing ample opportunity to re-evaluate a reality he once took for granted and amend his greatest mistake, or make matters worse.

Sauve’s characters are endearing in a ‘fuck off I’m a loser and this is just a funny story you’re reading duh’ kind of way, and the issues explored in his plotlines seem to hinge on whether the reader cares enough about them in the first place to bother seeing how their conflicts are resolved in the end, but hell, it’s just a funny story you’re reading after all, so why stop?

I never did, and I found Sam’s tale tremendously enjoyable.

The plight of the anti-hero rings loud and true in I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore. There might be no greater candidate in literature of late who better exemplifies a lost cause and challenges an audience’s ability to emphasize than Sam and his dimension-hopping doppelgangers.

Read this novel like you read your Facebook or Twitter threads, for kicks, and I think you’ll find it a lot more satisfying. I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore proves the time-consuming crush of reading good literature still trumps the quick-fix rush of skimming the feeds of an overly-saturated online world.